He captured the essence of Jimmy Nick so well, including all those phrases - sieges, milk bottles and the crucifixion - that we who worked with him heard so often.

Jimmy would surely have enjoyed the fact that there remains confusion over how he got his Prince of Darkness nickname, which he embraced while sometimes affecting to disdain it.

As Duncan pointed out, Jimmy took to wearing a black cape after reporting on (alleged) covens in the Isle of Man. And he also favoured dark glasses.

So version one (as Jimmy told Duncan) suggests that it emerged at the 1975 Balcombe Street siege when a senior police officer said: “That devil Nicholson is here”. Another cop countered that he wasn’t the devil, but the Prince of Darkness.

The startling silhouette of the caped crime correspondent prompted the BBC’s Keith Graves to remark that he looked like Dracula, the Prince of Darkness.

Verson two (b): in a couple of books, Jimmy attributed Graves’s comment to the Daily Mail’s John Edwards. Evidently, although John tended not to correct those who thought it was him, Graves should take the credit.

Also on the gentlemenranters site, incidentally, are two other tales about Jimmy, both of which may even be true. The first was told by Don Mackay (sometimes regarded as “the Prince’s apprentice”).

While working for the Daily Star in its early days, Jimmy got into trouble with the newsdesk for missing the fact that a man on trial at the Old Bailey for attempted murder had got off due to a technicality.

To rescue the situation, Jimmy secured a train seat behind the accused man and his parents so that he could eavesdrop. He used - so he said - the white spaces in the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle to jot down overheard quotes.

When the train reached its destination he also managed to obtain an exclusive interview. When he told the desk, all was forgiven and he was told to file asap.

But nothing arrived. Nicholson, who had left the Star’s stablemate, the Daily Express, a few months earlier had called his old paper by mistake, saying, as plenty of his reporting colleagues were used to hearing him say: “Ok, big noise, this is the prince, give me copy.”

As Mackay noted, within the course of just one day Jimmy had got into the mire, emerged from it and got back into it again: “Only a prince among men could achieve that.”

The second anecdote, “Prince fillip”, was told by TV presenter John Stapleton, who first met Jimmy when they worked in the Manchester office of the Daily Sketch.

He recalled a typical bit of Nicholson argot: “Got wheels, squire? I need to go on a mission.” Stapleton duly delivered Jimmy to a house in the back streets of Salford, waiting outside in the belief the senior man was on the trail of a scoop.

Two hours later Jimmy emerged and asked to be taken back to the office. It was months before Stapleton learned he had taken his colleague, as he put it euphemistically, “to the home of a lady friend.”

Some years later, when Stapleton was presenting a live broadcast for BBC’s Nationwide about launch of the Daily Star, he included a film profile of Jimmy.

Asked why, as chief crime reporter, he would be based in London when the paper’s main office was in Manchester, he replied: “Because you don’t get many assassination attempts in Cleckheaton, squire.”